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Weather eye: pummelled from space

Solar storms, such as the one this week, are part of a natural cycle that rises and falls roughly every 11 years

Paul Simons

January 28 2012, 12:01am, The Times

The big weather news this week came from space. A powerful solar storm erupted from a huge sunspot of the face of the Sun and pummelled the Earth’s upper atmosphere, setting off a stunning aurora that was seen in northern England and Scotland.

According to the Space Weather Prediction Centre in the US, the strength of the storm was rated 3 on a scale of 1 to 5, and was the strongest space storm since 2005. This so-called coronal mass ejection on the Sun threw out vast amounts of charged particles into space that streamed toward Earth at more than 6.5 million km/h.

When the particles hit the Earth’s magnetic field they were funnelled down towards the magnetic polar regions and collided with gas molecules…